Solar Trust of America nabs $2.1B loan for solar thermal plant

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded a $2.1 billion loan guarantee to Solar Trust of America for a solar thermal power plant near Blythe, Calif.

The Oakland, Calif.-based company secured the loan for the first phase of a project that will generate 1,000 megawatts of power. Solar thermal power plants use an array of mirrors that focus sunlight onto a single point on a tower. The heat from the focused sunlight heats up water, … Continue Reading

Vivox and T-Mobile turn Facebook into a phone company

Vivox, a voice app maker, is partnering with mobile carrier T-Mobile today to turn Facebook into a phone company. Together, they have created the Bobsled by T-Mobile app that lets Facebook users call each other for free with a single click on a PC.

The recipient of the call doesn’t even have to have the Bobsled app installed in order to receive the call. If it takes off among Facebook’s 600 million users, the app … Continue Reading

Google Map Maker opens in the US to improve local mapping

Google has opened its Map Maker tool, which lets locals contribute mapping information to Google Maps, in the United States.

Map Maker has previously been open to 183 countries and regions around the world. But Google has presumably held off on introducing the tool to the US market — for which there is already a ton of data available in Google Maps — until it had thoroughly tested the add-on.

Using Map Maker, citizens can … Continue Reading

Are E La Carte’s restaurant tablets better than waiters?

Tired of dealing with flaky waiters and other charming quirks from a night of dining out? E La Carte, a startup launching today, may have a solution to your restaurant woes with its iPad-like tablets.

Instead of waiting to be served by a waiter, you can use E La Carte’s 7-inch touchscreen tablet to view a restaurant’s menu and place an order, which gets sent directly to the kitchen to be prepared. While you’re waiting, … Continue Reading

NY companies: Join us at RRE Ventures May 11

If you’re based in New York and have the next big disruptive tech company, you’ll want to apply for a special session we’re hosting next month with one of New York’s  most respected venture capital groups, RRE Ventures.

A month after wrapping up DEMO Spring, we’re back traveling the world looking for the next awesome products to launch at the upcoming DEMO, to be held September 12-14 in Silicon Valley.

This New York session will … Continue Reading

Evernote releases "huge" update for Android

Popular note-taking software maker Evernote has been releasing one upgrade after another to its products over the last few months, including its iPhone, Windows, and Mac applications. Today the company released an upgrade to its Android application.

The version is called Evernote 3.0, and the company says this upgrade is huge. There are added sharing and organizational features, improved text editing, security options, new views and a revamped widget. Evernote is an application for storing … Continue Reading

Tapjoy says Apple has banned lucrative pay-per-install apps

Mobile app distribution service Tapjoy said today that a number of its developers have found that Apple has rejected their apps because they were running incentivized app installations, where one app encourages users to download another app as a kind of advertising promotion.

Apple hasn’t commented yet. Mihir Shah, chief executive of Tapjoy in San Francisco, said that the company’s developers found out over the weekend that Apple was rejecting their new pay-per-install apps and … Continue Reading

Meizu’s US expansion could cause trouble with Apple

Chinese smartphone maker Meizu wants to expand to the US, starting with an office in California, according to a forum posting by company head Jack Wong.

But such a move could cause further trouble with Apple, which managed to shut down the production of Meizu’s flagship M8 phone because of its similarities to the iPhone. (Production was later restored due to a patent dispute.)

A move to the US would be big for Meizu. The … Continue Reading

TreatFeed pays shoppers for social recommendations

Los Angeles startup TreatFeed just launched a new spin on the crossover between social networking and e-commerce — it wants to reward users for their social recommendations with prizes and cash.

Scott Roback, the company’s senior vice president of strategy and business development, said that where companies like Facebook are trying to build a social graph, TreatFeed is trying to create “the commerce graph, or the monetization layer of the social graph.”

Here’s how it … Continue Reading

Ticketfly raises another $12M to upend the ticketing industry

Ticketfly, the startup promising a more social networking-savvy approach to concert and event ticketing, just announced that it has raised $12 million in a second round of funding.

The San Francisco company offers tools for venues and promoters to create a concert website and social networking presence. Customers can manage all of their accounts within a single service, set up automatic tweets, and view analytics data about whether their social networking campaigns are paying off. … Continue Reading

VCs see tough and exciting landscape for game startups

The game industry has gotten a lot of love from venture capitalists lately. For many years, VCs invested a small amount of money into games compared to other hot investments such as social media. But in the age of Facebook and mobile gaming, that has changed. In 2010, VentureBeat’s own analysis found that 91 game companies raised $1.05 billion in 2010, up 58 percent from a year earlier.

So it was interesting to hear what … Continue Reading

White iPhone 4 appears with new Exposé-like multitasking interface (video)

A video has appeared online that demonstrates a new multitasking interface for iOS (that closely resembles the Mac OS’s Exposé feature) running on a 64-gigabyte white iPhone 4, courtesy of the intrepid Vietnamese gadget hounds Tinhte.

The group says the white iPhone is legitimate (not just a knockoff) and that it’s running a “test” version of iOS that has never been seen before.

It’s difficult to determine the veracity of their claims, but I wouldn’t … Continue Reading

Virtual storage startup Nutanix emerges from stealth, grabs $13.2M

Virtual storage startup Nutanix came out of stealth mode today, officially announcing $13.2 million in a first round of institutional funding.

The company said it will take aim at the $20 billion market currently building private clouds for server or desktop virtualization and service providers building public clouds.

The appliance leverages server-attached solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard disks, enabling organizations to run virtual machines without requiring a complex and costly SAN (storage area network) or … Continue Reading

Groupon goes shopping again, buying and retiring Whrrl creator Pelago

Group shopping site Groupon is continuing its buying spree, acquiring the parent company of check-in service Whrrl late Monday, dubbed Pelago, which the company said in a blog post it would retire on April 30.

Pelago was one of the first companies backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ iFund. In its early days, Whrrl seemed overshadowed by Loopt — now, of course, Foursquare is the king of the check-in startups.

Terms of the deal, … Continue Reading

Deals & More: Adaptly gets $2M more to aggregate social network ads

Today’s funding announcements include companies focused on buying ads, building and analyzing apps:

Adaptly brings in $2M more for consolidated ad buys: The New York-based startup has closed a first round of funding from First Round Capital, Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal & Partners, Charles River Ventures, Lerer Ventures and others, AdAge reports. The company also raised $700K in seed funding last October. Founded by a Northwestern University student during his senior year, the company allows brands … Continue Reading

Lymbix raises $1.35M to fix the tone of your emails

Lymbix has made a clever tool called ToneCheck that pre-screens the tone of your emails so that you say exactly what you mean to say. That has enabled the company to raise $1.35 million in funding from GrowthWorks Atlantic Venture Fund.

The Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada-based company launched its second-generation ToneCheck program on March 9, billing it as a kind of spellchecker to fix the tone of your messages. The company heads off those moments … Continue Reading

Gameview shows iPhone hits are starting to take off on Android

Gameview Studios is one of many developers that saw huge hits on the iPhone, particularly with its Tap Fish game, which has been downloaded more than 10 million times on Apple’s App Store. Now the company is starting to see good results on Google’s Android mobile devices as well.

It’s still early and the Android results can’t yet match those on the iPhone. But the results are good enough to pleasantly surprise Gameview, which is … Continue Reading

Atheros envisions an "internet of things" connected by home power lines

One of these days, there will be an “internet of things” — once-dumb appliances and gadgets smartened up with chips and internet connectivity. Wireless chip maker Atheros Communications believes that day is not so far away.

Today, the San Jose maker of wireless chips is announcing an initiative that will make it easy for internet-aware home appliances to transfer data over electrical wires in the home to a user’s web-connected devices and to the smart … Continue Reading

Samsung to sell hard disk business to Seagate for $1.375B

Samsung has agreed to sell its hard disk drive business to Seagate for $1.375 billion in cash and stock.

Coming off the heels of Western Digital’s $4.3 billion purchase of Hitachi’s storage business, the deal represents a major consolidation in the hard drive business, which is one of the fundamental technologies of the computer era.

Korea’s Samsung will shed the money-losing division and get a 9.6 percent stake, or 45.2 million shares, in Scotts Valley, … Continue Reading